Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds
IratePirate@feddit.org 13 hours agoA talk on LLMs I was listening to recently put it this way:
If we hear the words of a five-year-old, we assume the knowledge of a five-year-old behind those words, and treat the content with due suspicion.
We’re not adapted to something with the “mind” of a five-year-old speaking to us in the words of a fifty-year-old, and thus are more likely assume competence.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
LLMs don’t have the mind of a five year old, though.
They don’t have a mind at all.
They simply string words together according to statistical likelihood, without having any notion of what the words mean, or what words or meaning are; they don’t have any mechanism with which to have a notion.
They aren’t any more intelligent than old Markov chains (or than your average rock), they’re simply better at producing random text that looks like it could have been written by a human.
plyth@feddit.org 1 hour ago
What gives you the confidence that you don’t do the same?
IratePirate@feddit.org 5 hours ago
I am aware of that, hence the ""s. But you’re correct, that’s where the analogy breaks. Personally, I prefer to liken them to parrots, mindlessly reciting patterns they’ve found in somebody else’s speech.